Geekdom

Ma Ma Ma Mask

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I am still not feeling amazing, so once again I am going to lean upon the nostalgia that has been feeding me currently. One of the things that I mourn a little bit in this age of cable television, is the absence of specific dense blocks of cartoons. Saturday mornings for example started some time around 7 am and ended around 11 am with a solid block of new and exciting cartoons swapping every thirty minutes. Something similar occurred before and after school, and one of these blocks will have a special place in my heart.

Growing up we had three UHF channels, 23 which would eventually become a Fox Affiliate, 41 which eventually became a UPN Affiliate and 47 which was a weird religious channel. 41 especially was a magical place that tended to play the sorts of cartoons that I was really into at the time. I remember a very specific line up that included both Robotech and M.A.S.K. back to back… then if I kept watching got progressively stranger with Beverly Hills Teens and then for some reason Jim Baker’s PTL Club show.

I have a deep love of Robotech, but at the very least the Macross portion of that is a very well acknowledged and respected fandom. What effectively was one cohesive show to us kids as actually an edited and dubbed amalgam of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. We instead understood them as three time periods of the same battle in Macross Saga, The Masters and The New Generation. Of the three the third part was my favorite because of Cyclone armor.

However if I am being completely truthful my favorite of these cartoons was M.A.S.K. and sadly it is a really hard thing to track down. For starters M.A.S.K. has one of the best theme songs of any of the 80s cartoons. I’ve linked it above for your own benefit, because I still get all sorts of happy tingles when I hear it today. The toys were also freaking amazing, and in truth were sort of a weird spin off of transformers. Instead of vehicles that transform into robots… they are vehicles that change up in some way to enter a sort of battle mode with weapons that pop out. In the cartoon the Masks themselves played a role granting the wearer a special power that was never really explained how any of that worked.

There is also something weird going on with the logo that never really made sense. I think the “Mask” shown is supposed to be that of Matt Trakker, because the color scheme fits. However it obviously looks nothing like either the mask from the animation or the mask from the toy. I think instead it was likely supposed to make us THINK of Optimus Prime, and maybe confuse kids who were already into Transformers into maybe buying this other toy line of vehicles that transformed. I mean to be truthful being a fan of both… I was probably way more into M.A.S.K. than I was the Transformers.

I’ve talked about my “cool aunt” before that somehow managed to figure out the toy trends long before we even knew the toys exist. She was the one who got my Optimus Prime for Christmas the year before the cartoon really took off at least on our affiliate stations. The same was true with M.A.S.K. because if my fuzzy memory is correct I believe I got it as a birthday gift and was completely blown away by how cool the toy was. I’ve always been partial to the color green, and given my love of Cyclone Armor from Robotech, I was super on board with this motorcycle that transformed into a helicopter.

Around this same time there was a building toy by Fisher Price called Construx that was, while not hte same scale in the general range of the Mask Figures. I remember as I got more of the toys I built these elaborate bases for the figures and garages for their vehicles. There were many a “defend the base” scenario as Venom attacked, and later when StarCom was a thing… everything got sorta mixed together given they were both around the same scale.

I loved the cartoon for Mask so much, and I was super into the central conceit that they were this group of secret agents and anytime there was a mission they would call upon the specific team members that had the powers needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately that was never really how it worked, because recently I have been watching the show again and I am noticing that for the most part Matt Trakker the leader and Bruce Sato and Alex Sector the team that drives the vehicle Rhino are pretty much on every single mission.

I think looking back, why the cartoon felt so good to watch and why it hooked me in such a significant way is that it had a self insert character in the form of Scott Trakker. So often in the cartoons of the 80s… if there are kids involved they are the ones that are constantly getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. If that is not the case then they serve as the comic relief character, which also feels odd at times. Sure Scott got into plenty of trouble, but they gave him T-Bob a robotic companion that serves as this the Orko or Snarf of this series, allowing Scott to be the brave one that often times saves the day through his misadventures. It was super easy to transplant yourself in the role of this character while still being able to play along as the various team members.

Lately I have really been wanting to watch the cartoon, but the problem is… there are seemingly issues with the distribution. It has been released in two forms so far, a 12 disc dvd set and a “volume one” DVD release that never got any follow up releases. In both cases there are issues, the 12 Disc set claims to be the complete series but includes only 65 episodes and is missing the 10 episode short run season 2. This has also been out of print for some time and I have seen it going on ebay for upwards of $250. The “volume one” is available but only includes 11 episodes, and without any subsequent releases it kinda makes it a useless product.

In my travels however I came across someone who has ripped all 75 of the episodes and uploaded them to YouTube. The quality is not great, and I hope at some point we get a proper release of this series, but for now I am happy enough. I may or may not have downloaded all of the episodes so I have a local copy, and was able to pull them in 480p. Honestly I spent the other night watching several of these and they mostly still hold up. It is absolutely peak 1980s, but so am I at times. Needless to say it is still very watchable and I legitimately think modern kids would probably even be into it.

In my recent tripping down memory lane, I uncovered that apparently there was an unofficial follow up to mask that took place in 1996 called Vor-Tech. The vehicles even looked like maybe they recycled some pieces from the later Mask toys, specially the Desert Striker looks quite similar to one of the later generation Mask releases. While looking functionally different, the Rattler effectively does the same thing that Gator does so there was at a minimum a recycling of ideas. I was in college during this time and completely missed the existence of this thing, which is sort of a bummer. I was collecting the new releases of Star Wars figures at this time, so I probably would have tried to pick some of these up for sheer nostalgia if for no other reason.

Another thing that I have noticed going back and watching these… I am absolutely certain that Bruce Sato and Alex Sector were a couple. Sure Hondy Maclean and Buddie Hawks were paired up in the Firecracker but that made sense given that there was the Truck and attached Motorcycle, and later in the series/toy line they both got their own unique vehicle in the form of the Hurricane and the Wildcat. Bruce and Alex were always paired up in the Rhino and were never dispatched separately, in a vehicle that in theory only ever needed a single pilot. Alex as the bald bear and Bruce his little twink boy toy, and no one is going to change my mind about that.

Mask toys have always been somewhat of a rarity, and as a result command a premium in the aftermarket. However recently there has been an interesting find. Someone was opening up an old warehouse and stumbled upon a bunch of new in box Kenner merchandise from the 80s including case after case of Mask toys. I remember after the second series it became exceptionally hard to find Mask stuff, and if my memory serves me Walmart and K-Mart stopped carrying it entirely. It makes me wonder if this hoard of product form Chile was just stuff that never made it into the distribution system because a bunch of the vendors backed out on the line. Whatever the case, it is really interesting to see this sort of thing pop up. I doubt I will buy any of it, but still very cool nonetheless.

Friday Debris

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This is Tripod, named such for the fact that she is a three legged cat that comes to visit from time to time. Tripod does not realize we love her yet, and bolts at the sight of us… but we do our best to try and make sure she has food. She is one of a handful of neighborhood cats that occasionally visit our house and we were scared to death that she was no longer with us. We’ve had a cold snap and for a couple of weeks we had not managed to catch any sight of her on the front porch cam where we put out food every day. However several times this week we have seen her lurking around the backyard which was pretty much the highlight of the week. We are hoping she is still around during the spring and summer months and maybe just maybe we can teach her that we are friendly people while we are out and about in the back and front yard more often.

This Friday post is somewhat turning into a “things left on the cutting room floor” post about the week. The other day I talked about restarting Witcher 2 so that I could go down the path that was not taken, and I have now reached the first branch in the road… and more or less determined that I made the correct choice the first time. While I greatly enjoyed the “non-human” path, I gotta say I am not loving the blatant racism and bigotry of the “human” path right now. Additionally it is super weird to have as my companions, characters that I more or less learned to greatly dislike during the other play through. As a result my completion of this play through is pretty much in jeopardy. In many games the various path options are equally good and it is just a matter of taste, but for me at least there seems like a clear correct choice here and I made the wrong one on attempt two.

The other issue from which I am suffering is that I am staying up way the hell too late reading and it is starting to cut into my sleep schedule. It feels thoroughly odd to be saying this because I have not been a person to stay up late reading that often in my life. This is complicated by the fact that I read relatively slowly and that at least until my wife falls asleep she is pretty regularly making random comments while I attempt to follow the text. At this point I am roughly halfway through the second book in the Witcher series and I am looking forward to getting into the novels proper having focused on the two prequel short story collections first. The books have not really done much yet to improve my opinion of Yennefer, which is weird because I thought all of the loyalty fans have must have come from reading the books.

Another weird revelation is that there were a lot of moments in Witcher 3 that I mistook as me not knowing what was going on because I had not played the other games. Now I know I am completely incorrect in that assessment and instead the game is just deep diving into character relationships from the books without giving the player much of a heads up about it. Last night I read for example the story of Dudu Biberveldt, a character that I just assumed had showed up in the games before. However having played the second game and watched several synopsis videos of the first game… I am pretty certain that is not a thing and he just lives in the novels. I have to admit though it is this sort of thing that makes the setting so infectious for me, because the things that are constantly left unanswered make me want to go then dig for the answers. I have a feeling that it might have the opposite effect on some of my friends however.

Yesterday was a big reveal of the next expansion for Elder Scrolls Online, and we are going back to Skyrim. The expansion seems like it is going to center on the Solitude area and more importantly Blackreach, one of the coolest areas in Elder Scrolls V. I am all about Dwemer ruins, and supposedly Blackreach is going to make up roughly half of the playable content area in this expansion. They are once again doing a year long story that unfolds over the course of several updates, and considering that I didn’t play any of the “Year of the Dragon” content, I am wondering if this is time for me to update the client and go back into the game. I have most of Morrowind and all of the newer content to experience.

I realize this in some ways goes directly in the face of my whole desire to stop chasing the forever game, but for Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars the Old Republic I play them more or less in a single player manner. I come back to the game after a large bundle of content has built up and then can happily binge the new story in an almost Netflix manner before leaving once again and going off and playing other things. I wish I could play World of Warcraft in the same sort of manner, but the way their patch content is released makes it a struggle to try and figure out what the hell is going on at any time if you were not around to see it doled out in small chunks. I am realizing that I find I greatly prefer content that is gated behind completing the previous content just for sake of making it easier to follow.

Games of the Decade: 2018

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Monster Hunter World – PS4

We are getting towards the end now, two more years to go in this decade worth of gaming. I am finding it as I get more into “recent” history I am having way more trouble narrowing things down to a handful of games. For 2017, 2018 and 2019 I wound up with massive lists, I think in part because everything is still very fresh in my memory. Looking back at 2010 for example you can easily tell which games have stood the test of time. I’ve been playing Witcher 3 this holiday break and I more or less still consider it to be a current game even though it released over four years ago. Lets dig into what turned out to be another really solid year or games. Once again the disclaimer that this is the list of games that were personally important to me and not some sort of objective “best games” list.

God of War

God of War – PS4

I was a little late to getting around to playing “Dad of War” but this is largely because I have not been the biggest fan of the series for awhile. I loved the original when it came out on the PS2, but each sequel for some reason felt watered down from what worked in the first one. The “newness” had warn off and each derivative sequel failed to show me something new and interesting, which is a weird statement for me considering how much I like dusting off characters I have visited before and taking them on one more ride. What God of War gives me is a reason to care about Kratos. IN the past he was simply murder incarnate which was fun for awhile, but eventually once the carnage passed you were left with minimal story to cling to. This game presents an interesting tale of aging and fatherhood that brings something new to the series and also presents it in a much modern nature.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 – PC

I played the original Far Cry game, not because it was some sort of a story masterpiece but because it presented an extremely high tech shooter with interesting AI. As the sequels released I failed to hop on that band wagon and returned with the 3rd installment and bounced pretty hard during some of the force stealth elements. So Far Cry 5 is the game that managed to rope me into the series once again by presenting an interesting narrative about a religious cult in Montana and the fight of the locals to free themselves from their yoke. I like games like this, where you have an overarching story but a bajillion mini adventures to lose yourself in, and I found the narrative told through the side content to be way more compelling than the main story. The game has its problems, but I enjoyed my time spent with it.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn – PC

I don’t post screenshots of this game other than the title screen, because effectively everything about it is a potential spoiler. The style of the game is similar to those of the early Macintosh games and it is effectively a visual puzzle game with the interface of an FPS shooter. You are an insurance inspector come to examine the Obra Dinn a ship previously declared lost at sea that happened to drift into port five years too late. You use a compass like device that allows you to jump into moments in time and explore them for clues to ultimately determine the fate of all 51 of the passengers. This game was like reading a great book and from the moment I started it I could not stop until I had solved all of it. Each step gave me more tidbits of the dark and interesting story of this fateful ship and its crew.

Dragalia Lost

Dragalia Lost – Android

This is the second mobile game that I have really imprinted upon, and I am not sure if I can explain fully why it is so compelling. It walks this thin line between abusive micro transactions and giving you lots of free stuff. It feels as though you earn the alternate currency fast enough that you can keep doing gacha summons on a regular basis to keep infusing the game with new things for you to play with. The game also has the best release cadence that I have seen, and I am hoping that more games adopt something similar. There is always an event going on, or an event has just concluded and the next one starts within a few days. These events offer enough of a tweak to the core game play and enough new items and characters to chase to keep you engaged in the grind. Only recently have I stopped playing through at least the daily missions every night, as Diablo 3 on Switch has occupied the same before bedtime gameplay. Excellent game, but I think probably the worst part of it is the fact it is on a touch screen device. I would love to see it on something like the Nintendo Switch.

Magic the Gathering: Arena

Magic the Gathering: Arena

I’ve loved Magic the Gathering since I first got my first starter deck back in 1994. I played the game heavily for years and then have dipped my toes in off and on since that point. As various companies explored presenting Magic in an online format I tried to get into those as well. The closest for me was Hearthstone and for years all I really wanted was for Wizards of the Coast to stop fearing the internet and presenting an online game-play experience similar to that. In 2018 they did exactly that and it officially killed off any interest I had in the competitors. I don’t play Arena nearly as often now as I did those first several months, but it is still a deeply enjoying experience that lets me get in and play some Magic whenever I feel like doing so. Also find it super useful for testing out deck ideas since it seems to be way easier to accumulate the pieces on Arena since I Have so many proxy tokens.

Monster Hunter World

Monster Hunter World – PS4

For years I had heard great things about the Monster Hunter franchise but found the game as a whole to be extremely obtuse and difficult to get into. You more or less had to already be indoctrinated into the game in order to really grok each subsequent release, either that or have one of your friends willing to sherpa you through the experience. What world does is presents the game in easy to understand bites and with far greater visual fidelity than any of the mobile devices could muster. I played the hell out of this game and it really became an object of obsession when it released later on the PC. I am disappointed that Capcom is seemingly determined to keep the two games separate from each other, but I fully expect in January to dive in head first when the PC version gets the Iceborne expansion.

Mandalorian and Lumina

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Not shocking to anyone, I spent a good chunk of my evening messing around on Disney Plus, the latest streaming service vying for some of our monthly budget. The reason of course is due to a single show, at least for now. The Mandalorian was in fact enough to get me to subscribe just to watch the first episode, that and a deal that they were running a few months back where you could get a year of the service for somewhere in the ballpark of $60. That was enough to get me to jump on board ahead of time, and I am happy to report that I am not ashamed of this action thanks to having watched the first episode.

I am purposefully swiping screenshots from the trailers that were released because firstly it is easier to do and secondly I don’t want to give anything away. The show so far is very much like a Clint Eastwood style western set in the Star Wars Universe. I am curious to find out some of the back story as this show is set between the fall of the empire and the rise of the new order. It was always my understanding that much like the Empire hunted down the Jedi… they also more or less decimated what was left of the Mandalorian clans. So I find it really interesting to see what appears to be the remnants of the clan alive and well. That said a lot of the lore surrounding the Mandalorians is apocryphal thanks to the whole tossing out of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

I greatly enjoyed this first episode… and am now looking forward to Friday when the next one drops. I wish I could have binged through the entire thing in a single evening, but this is probably much smarter for Disney as a whole given that they can string us along with the Mandalorian while waiting on the various Marvel shows to drop. I personally wound up spending my evening watching Star Wars Resistance after finishing the episode because it was a show that I had never actually watched any of. There is enough meat on the bones of Disney Plus to entertain me for awhile, because even if I watch through the back catalog of all things Star Wars… there are a bunch of Disney things like Phineas and Ferb that I have only watched a handful of episodes of. There is also the entirety of Gravity Falls on the service, another show i have caught the occasional episode but would love to start from the beginning.

In other news I finished up the Lumina weapon quest chain in Destiny 2 and it ends fairly abruptly with you just getting the Hand Cannon at the end of completing the final objective. I am annoyed as hell that it dropped at 948 instead of 950, but that seems to be the case when you finish a quest chain. Weirdly I had been putting off on this quest until the other night I was randoming my way into strikes and happened to kill Xol and notice that I got credit marked off the quest. I had originally read that you had to complete the quest in a single go, but it seems like that only pertains to each objective. I queued specifically for Will of the Thousands, killed 11 crystals and got the weapon dropped in my inventory mid strike.

Now I just need to wrangle some time to play when other people I know are on and go run the strike required for the completion of Thorn. I’ve not been willing to risk it since I seem to die an awful lot to the final boss of Savathun’s Song, it would be nice to at least have another person so that we don’t instantly fail when one of us dies.